


[I-Man ficlets and drabbles]

by aces



Category: The Invisible Man (TV 2000)
Genre: Drabble Collection, Ficlet Collection, Gen, M/M, Mild Language
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-16
Updated: 2019-09-15
Packaged: 2020-10-19 13:57:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20658380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aces/pseuds/aces
Summary: Place to collect ficlets, drabbles, etc. in one place without creating a whole bunch of new fics. :)





	1. the body betrays

He throws the little brown plastic bottle at the wall. He doesn’t look at me.

“I _hate_ the pills,” he mutters.

“Take the pills, Bobby,” I say, while I watch him.

*

He hates the pills. He hates that they mark him out, that they have some kind of hold over him. He hates being beholden to chemicals, to enemies he cannot see to fight. I think he hates that, in some way, he’s betraying himself.

I hate that I think I might know how he feels.

*

I pick up the bottle and press it into his chest, holding it there till he lifts his hand to take it from my hand. I squeeze his hand as I pass the bottle over to him.

“I hate the counteragent,” I tell him.

He stares up at me.

“I fucking hate the pills,” he says.

“Take the pills, Bobby,” I tell him gently.


	2. What Others Tell You

He used to believe that everyone knew him better than he knew himself, and therefore he should listen to everything they said and believe them. And when they told him he wasn’t trying hard enough, and when they told him he could do so much better if only he applied himself, he believed them. But that didn’t mean he had to do what was implied in their complaints and remonstrances. He even believed his brother when Kevin yelled at him.

And when Liz told him he just might make a halfway decent thief, he believed her too. Hey, it was something to do. Not to mention really impressive to all the guys.

But at some point, he stopped believing them, stopped believing everyone when they said they trusted him, when they said he’d done wrong and was going to jail, when they said they loved him, when they said he was smart or he was an idiot. He stopped listening, closed his ears to the white noise, and carried on with what he wanted to do. Though maybe by that point it wasn’t so much what he wanted to do as he didn’t know what *else* to do.

It was easier that way. He only had to listen to himself, and sometimes he didn’t even bother doing that much. It wasn’t like he had anything particularly interesting or insightful to say about himself, after all.

He’d never even really listened to Casey, even. But then, it wasn’t as if she’d have anything useful to say, since half of what he told her about himself was necessarily lies. But sometimes, sometimes he caught something of her words, of her honest-to-god’s truthful opinions about him, and it warmed him up a bit. Until he remembered he wasn’t really who she thought he was, and then he just shut his ears and coolly stopped listening again.

When he got stuck with the gland, everyone was telling him what they thought of him. Kevin had always been very exact and specific in his remarks regarding his brother, but, hell, even *Eberts* occasionally told him exactly what the accountant thought of him. Bobby and the Keep and at times even the ‘Fish never shut up about what they thought of him.

It was irritating at first, having to ignore all that white noise. But then like Casey, he started paying attention occasionally, and heard what they had to say about him. And what they didn’t have to say about him, or simply how they acted around him. Like how Bobby would start doing things instantly when he snapped at him to do them in the middle of a firefight, or how when he and Bobby could just start flowing together when working out a case, and how sometimes Bobby would just take his criminal expertise as useful rather than something to be sneered at.

And Claire always had the keychain crap ready to placate (irritate, more like), and when the Official wasn’t feeling gleefully and bureaucratically godlike, he could be quite complimentary in his own…odd way. The kid was applying himself. He was trying to do more.

He used to believe that everyone knew him better than he knew himself, and therefore he should listen to everything they said and believe them. And he started finding himself thinking that, even if they didn’t really know him better than he knew himself, they might at least occasionally have the right idea.


	3. solitaire

“How the hell can you do that?” Bobby asks him in a frustrated growl, pacing the room. 

Darien is playing solitaire at the pool table taking pride of place in his apartment. “How can I do what?”

“Play those damned card games. Don’t they bore the hell out of you?”

“No,” Darien replies, moving one small set of cards and turning over the card beneath. It’s a repeated pattern, old and worn and comfortably familiar like his favourite Barfly t-shirt. He likes the routine, the clear knowledge of the only possibilities that will come next. It’s a bit of sanity in an otherwise insane life.

“They bore me,” Bobby spits out and sprawls into the chair across the table from Darien. “Can’t you do something else?”

“Like what? We could play poker, but you don’t trust me not to turn all the aces invisible and put them up my sleeve.”

“Hell no, not after last time.” And this is old and worm and comfortably familiar too, and Darien doesn’t want that to change either. Is it weird to think of Bobby as a semblance of sanity? Yeah, probably. Definitely. “Do you ever do anything, Fawkes?”

“I’m playing cards right now,” Darien responds, on the defense but not caring too particularly. “I read. I listen to music. I make paper airplanes. It might not sound like much, but it’s a fulfilling life.”

Bobby Hobbes has an eloquent snort.

A flip, a swish, the seven of hearts. Useless for now. Even the thief thing had been a helluva lot more stable than these days—it had to be, or else you were a pretty crappy thief. And, okay, yeah, he hadn’t been the greatest thief, but the thing with the old guy was just a huge mistake that anyone coulda made…

Flip, swish, slap as a card is thrown down on the wood table. Bobby’s being awfully quiet now, and Darien looks up to see what he’s doing now.

“You’re seriously not bored?” Bobby asks the instant their eyes meet.

Darien rolls his eyes and slouches lower in his seat. “Do I look bored? No. Am I constantly whining about being bored? No. I am perfectly content with my card game.”

“Let’s go out,” Bobby says. “C’mon, you and me, two guys out to conquer the world. We’ll have fun.”

“I’m having fun,” Darien insists.

Bobby growls and flops back in his chair. “Hey, don’t let me hold you back,” Darien says, glancing up again while flipping the discard pile idly through nimble fingers. Thief’s fingers, used to snatching and grabbing quickly, fiddling with the little things. “You don’t have to stick around, Hobbes.”

“What, am I screwing up your routine?”

Darien frowns down at his evenly spread out piles of cards. “What routine?” he asks.

“Your routine, you know, your routine. Isn’t this the way you wind down, cool off, chill, before calling it a night, before heading off to bed?”

“Uh…yeah, I guess.” He flips another card, three of clubs, nothing doing, he discards it with a neat little twist of his wrist. “So what? You like to go out and party, I like a quiet night in. What’s the big deal?”

“What big deal, there’s no big deal.” He’s talking fast again, the way he does when he’s nervous or avoiding a subject he wants to talk about but doesn’t. Darien looks up at him again. “You just like your routine.”

Flip, swish, a gentle smack as the card lands on top of another card. The cards are bent, dirty to the touch; he’s had them forever. Perhaps there’s grooves in them from where he holds them, where he always places his fingers, automatically. He savors the uncertainty in the routine; he doesn’t know if he’ll win or lose this game, but he knows one or the other is inevitable, and he knows his pattern of playing, the best pattern he’s come up with to win over years and years of playing solitaire. It’s strangely soothing, the repetition of oft-used manipulations, strategies.

If maybe a little boring.

“Yeah, I like my routine,” Darien says. “So what? You have your routines too. Like the way you clean your gun. Or the way you check everything in your specific order in Golda. Jesus, Hobbes, you’ve got more routine than I do.”

Bobby shrugs, working his whole body into it the way he does when he’s really trying to be elaborately casual. Darien decides it’s best just to ignore him and continue playing. But the game isn’t holding the same comforting appeal it’s held for so long. Suddenly it seems pointless, unthinking routine. 

He could be spending his time in better ways.

Calmly, Darien pushes all the cards together in a giant pile in front of him. Bobby watches him, frowning. “Fawkes? I don’t think I know this game.”

Darien grins. “Could play a little fifty-two card pickup.”

Still got an eloquent snort. “You play. I’ll sit this one out.”

“You can’t sit this one out,” Darien says. “It’s a two-person game.”

“Oh yeah.” Bobby sounds skeptical. “I’m not much of one for card games, Fawkes.”

“Not a card game,” Darien shakes his head seriously. He stands up and gestures for Bobby to do the same. Hobbes does so, frowning. Darien comes closer, and when Bobby opens his mouth to talk, the younger man kisses him.

After a while he steps back, and Bobby looks up at him thoughtfully. “Now that game I could like,” he said.

“I thought you might.”

They ended up having to play fifty-two card pickup anyway, but only much, much later.


	4. the colors of my life

All colour had been drained out of his life. He realised this was true once he started dreaming occasionally in quicksilver. He’d never told them this desperate reason to get rid of the damned gland, this particular reason among so many, many others. He wasn’t sure how he could tell them he was afraid of becoming black and white without his shades of brown and plaid and neon orange, afraid of turning permanently into the silver ghost that no-one would ever see again.

One Simon Cole in the world was enough.

Bobby kept colour in his life. Bobby was brown for him, and his own shades of forest green and light blue and deep, dark, black red. Darien clung to Bobby’s colours, and when he dreamt of Bobby in the night, he never dreamed in quicksilver, but in full, glorious Technicolour.


End file.
